Sophie was doing that thing where she fake-naps — eyes closed, perfectly still, but the second you move toward the door she pops up like a whack-a-mole — and I was sitting on the floor outside her room with my AirPods in, desperately trying to finish the last hour of this book before the school pickup alarm went off. That's the energy of A Curse for True Love. Frantic, a little breathless, and honestly? Pretty satisfying once you get there.
I should back up. I listened to the first two books in Stephanie Garber's Once Upon a Broken Heart trilogy last summer during a beach vacation where my husband actually watched the kids for stretches longer than twenty minutes (miracle), and I flew through them. Garber writes these candy-colored fairytale worlds that feel like biting into a really good macaron — sweet, layered, slightly over the top, and gone too fast. So I'd been waiting for this finale.
Evangeline Without Her Memories Hits Different
The setup here is wild: Evangeline has lost her memories and is basically living in a gilded cage with her prince husband, Apollo, while Jacks — the Prince of Hearts, the morally questionable love interest we've all been rooting for since book one — is out there trying to reach her. What works about this conceit is that you're watching Evangeline rediscover things that YOU already know, and there's this delicious tension in the gap between what she understands and what you're screaming at her about. Like when she finds Jacks's notes and doesn't know what they mean but you're sitting in your parked car gripping the steering wheel going "THAT'S BECAUSE HE LOVES YOU, GIRL."
The dual POV is new for this book — we get Evangeline's chapters AND Jacks's perspective for the first time — and honestly, getting inside Jacks's head was the thing I didn't know I needed. He's been this enigmatic, sharp-edged question mark for two books, and finally hearing his side made the whole trilogy click into place. The scenes where he's desperate to get to Evangeline but knows his kiss could literally kill her? That's the kind of romantic tension that makes you forget you're sitting in a Target parking lot waiting for a prescription. Lover Arisen gave me that same white-knuckle, I-cannot-put-this-down feeling — another brooding immortal who's terrible for the heroine and absolutely impossible to stop rooting for.
Two Narrators, Two Very Different Vibes
Okay, here's where I need to be real. Rebecca Soler has been narrating this series from the start and she is genuinely wonderful — her Evangeline is youthful and warm without being annoying, and she handles the emotional swings (confusion, fear, that dawning sense of OH NO I'M IN LOVE WITH THE VILLAIN) with this breathless quality that just works. When Evangeline is piecing together her lost memories, Soler's voice carries this fragile hopefulness that got me right in the chest.
Dan Bittner, who's new for book three and handles Jacks's chapters? Mixed bag. He's got a rich, mature voice that works beautifully for some of the darker, more brooding moments. But Jacks is supposed to be this ageless-but-youthful immortal heartthrob, and Bittner sounds... well, he sounds like someone's distinguished uncle reading at a podium. It's not BAD. It's just not the voice I'd been hearing in my head for Jacks for two books. Every time it switched from Soler to Bittner, I needed a second to recalibrate. By the middle of the book I'd adjusted, but if you loved the single-narrator flow of the first two, prepare yourself for a shift.
The Ending Everyone Has Feelings About
I'm going to tread carefully here because spoilers, but: the ending wraps things up. Maybe a little too neatly for a trilogy that spent three books being delightfully chaotic. There's a moment in the final chapters that felt like Garber was checking boxes — giving everyone exactly what they wanted in a way that was sweet but didn't have the gut-punch I was bracing for. And look, I literally said I don't want to ugly-cry at pickup. But I wanted to ALMOST ugly-cry, you know? I wanted to feel the weight of everything Evangeline and Jacks went through, and the resolution came so quickly that I didn't fully get there.
Still? Satisfying ending. Exactly what I needed after two books of emotional whiplash. Not groundbreaking, but sometimes you don't need groundbreaking. Sometimes you need the kiss to land and the villain to get what's coming to them and to walk into your house after car line feeling like the world is a little more okay.
Survived 47 pauses and still made sense. The memory-loss plot actually HELPS with the pause-and-resume problem because Evangeline is also confused, so you're basically in the same boat.
Who Should Listen (And Who Should Skip)
If you read the first two books and you're invested in Jacks and Evangeline, this is the payoff you've been waiting for. If you're coming in fresh — don't. Go back to Once Upon a Broken Heart. You'll be completely lost otherwise, and you'll miss the buildup that makes this finale work.
Skip this if you need your fantasy romance to have deep worldbuilding or complex magic systems — Garber's world is gorgeous but thin, like really beautiful wallpaper. It's about the feelings, not the framework. And if Bittner's voice is going to bug you (and for some people it really will), maybe grab the ebook and keep Soler's voice from the first two books playing in your head instead.
I finished this during nap time. High praise. My book club will love this — if I ever have time for book club again.
